Originally Posted by
Brontosaurus
By coincidence, I too have been returning to Vie-Long horse-hair knots and their siblings, the Vie-Long horse-badger knots. It's true that they are a bit different from boar and straight badger knots.
One problem that caused me to move away from theme was the knot clumping together after a soak. More recently, I've turned to just dunking the horse-hair or horse-badger knot in water for around 30-45 seconds prior to loading. This has helped tremendously, and they have returned to being my favored hair type. Personally, I do not think that they are all that cut out for face-lathering, which involves a certain amount of splay and also resulting in prickle in this case. Rather, here I prefer to build a lather in a bowl from loaded brush, by adding droplets of water from the faucet until the desired consistency has been reached. Following this method, I've been very happy with these brushes over the past couple of months.
A few years back, Vie-Long brushes were a breed apart from the Anglo-American line of brushes. Lofts were longer relative to the knot diameter and handles were shorter. I really don't like the recent move to shorten lofts and lengthen handles in this case. For example, a 21mm x 55mm horse hair or horse badger knot was a nice all-around size with a handle tapering from being wider at the knot to a second wide lip at the base. With creams, one could back off on the handle to the lip at the base and the 55mm loft acted like a much larger brush. Conversely, with hard soaps, one could choke up on the loft with one's fingers, temporarily shortening it this way. Now the loft has been shortened to 50-51mm, more or less making it a brush only to be used with soaps, and the handles often look like the company has been purchased by Edwin Jagger or Muehle, as they are identical in styling and not conducive to multi-function as before. Where there used to be a number of handle styles that used to please me, both with the small and large knots, now there are only one or two from each knot type and the length is becoming closer and closer with only the diameter being different.